Go cougs

October 31, 2014

Interaction Project

When I was doing my interaction project I realized that I really was doing people good and helping them step back and see what truly makes them happy. But we encountered a few problems. We were trying to get people to draw pictures of what made them happy and we wanted them to realize that digital interaction is not what happiness is all about, instead it is social interaction with real people face to face. Getting away from your phone and the internet every now and then does wonders to the creative process along with ones happiness. We were wanting to see what people think of when we tell them to draw what makes them happy, and with no surprise no one drew any pictures of their Facebook account or any social media site. People drew pictures of their family, a sport, or an event that took place a while ago, because that makes them happy not social media.

Many people appear to have life figured out, with all their likes, followers, or “friends” online. But the goal of this project was to see if that actually made them happy. We encountered a few problems when we were conducting this project though. We noticed that people don’t have enough time to help us with this project, we saw that some people just didn’t want to volunteer, and we learned the hard way that doing this project in the cub made it hard to hear our audio when we pulled together a video. We noticed that these could all be simple fixes though if we were conducting this experiment to the right audience.

So we took our talents to the art building.

The people we found there were very helpful and willing to work with us and also created some very cool drawings. We also really liked hearing why they drew their drawings, because some got very deep and explained a lot more than just their creative process; they connected it to a past experience and told a story that will stick with me forever. There are bigger pictures than just what is right in front you, there are more opportunities in life than just what is right

The talent we found was very impressive, even my roommate said something I never expected. When I passed him the paper and pencils he says “I can’t draw anything unless I have four different colors and a straight edge”. He is not very artistic but how he took the drawing so serious was surprising and I could tell he wanted to do a good job even though this was not that important to him. We had another person outside of the art class who took it serious and drew a couple rabbits and connected them to sexuality. People were a lot more serious than we expected and we knew we were accomplishing our goals and getting people to realize that social media is not a form of happiness.

I am connecting this experiment with an older reading from Don Norman, where it discusses the multiple uses and affordances of an object. This is an abstract connection because it is how each person looked at the word happiness and how they interpreted it in a different way. Each person took the project serious and went into detail with both their drawing and explanation and I believe it was a success.